Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Well I finally joined the millions upon millions of American who belong to a fitness club. Let’s just hope I don’t join them in their quest to not use the membership.

Here in Hawaii we have quite a few 24 Hour Fitness clubs, which has recently taken over Bally’s as teh number 1 grossing club in America. I have been reluctant to join because I always had full access to weights and cardio machines in high school and college. Those come with tuition. I never wanted to spend the money to go and workout. Plus I could always do push-ups and sit-ups and go for a run.

As of late I have been working on getting back into shape running and biking as much as my motivation will take me. This past month it has literally rained every single day making my motivation not very high for me going outside and running. I must say though. I have had quite a few runs and rides in the rain, in my defense. My fiance on the other hand is able to go to 24 Hour whenever she likes and lift weights or use their cardio machines, not worrying what the weather is like outside.

Next, looking at what my physique or lack there of has become over the past few years is not fun, so I also decided I needed to lift weights again. Saying is one thing and doing is another. Therefor, I finally figured that if I spent the money on a membership it would force myself to use it. That and I enjoy getting into a lifting routine and have been missing that aspect of working out for quite some time, almost 3 years. This was the final push for me getting the membership. I know a lot of people use this as their reason and then never use it but I hope that spending money I dont’ really have will be motivation enough.

We’ll see how it goes but I think it will be a good addition to the things I am already doing and allow me to get back into the shape that I once was in and hopefully surpass it.

Dave G over at Brighton Vibes has 27 domain names that he would like to sell to you. He had 29 but decided to develop one of the sites after someone inquired about the already developed site.

Some of the domains are:

hyundaisportsclub.com
hyundaisportsclub.net
new-york-city-accident-lawyers.com
pet-urine-removal.com
phentermine-directory.com
rightpad.com
searchgrub.com
stuffthatglows.com

The hyundaisportsclub.com is already developed and has a forum and everything on it. If I knew the first things about cars past the 80’s I might think about that one and snatch it up right away. Plus Google says it has 176 pages indexed from the site already.

Check em’ out.

Thought I would keep you all updated as to where my time has been spent. I have read and enjoyed the following posts and articles and think you may like them as well.

Yaro posts about a guy who made $500,000 using AdSense in one year. He has a link to a video from the guy as well, and it’s a new one, not that English guy everyone has seen the video from.

Wordpress Theme Browser - Quickly thumb through all the themes of wordpress 1.5 and higher. Always useful, and is helping me decide on a blog network layout.

Found a new site by a young lady trying to build an internet empire. She has a good list of 15 steps an affiliate marketer goes through at her blog. Her site is an interesting read, I suggest you swing by.

In an effort to get more comments on my site I have joined yesfollow.org and activated the dofollow plugin. I’ll let you know the results, or maybe you can help me.

I also stop by Neville’s Financial Blog from time to time to see what that guy is up to. Once again he has his picture taken with some famous guy. This time he met the CEO of GE. How he does it is beyond me. He also snapped a photo with Matthew McConaughey, and we all know how dreamy that guy is??? Check him, he’s go some interesting things going on.

Happy surfing.

Erik

After a brief stint, one that I think every blogger goes through, I am definitely keeping this blog going and going strong. Over the past few days I have increased my posting and hopefully increased my helpfulness to the blogosphere and my readers.

The reason for wanting to close this blog wasn’t because I don’t think it’s useful or helpful to others. I hope that at least a few of my posts have been useful. My main reason was because I wasn’t making the profits from this site and I thought I could increase my indexed pages by splitting up the blog.

How foolish of me.

The whole reason for this blog was to help me accomplish my goals and to keep people up to date with what I have been doing. That as well as offering advice and tips as I learn them myself. Stopping this blog would be the worst thing I could do. No, I am keeping it and I am back with a vengeance. Or at least back blogging strong as can be.

I have a new found focus with my endeavours. I am keeping this blog and going to try my best not to neglect the postings here while trying to start a blog network of my own. I know it will be difficult as blog networks are very time consuming but I intend to take a very organized and calculated approach to setting this network up.

Next I am continuing to keep up with my athletic challenges and I may even start training for a triathlon in addition to the running that I have been doing. I need to learn to swim laps and distances but that may just become my lunch time fun. With that I will keep posting here what I learn and updates on my progress. As you may have read I did a triathlon relay this weekend and completed the running portion of 3.5 miles with an average pace of 6:24 per mile. Not the greatest but ahead of where I wanted to be. That was most of my inspiration to begin swimming. We’ll see how far I get.

I have also been working on my first niche content site built for AdSense ads and that is coming along slowly but surely. I hope to write a little php code to standardize all my niche content sites and make them easier to maintain. Right now they are strictly html and a pain in the butt to keep up with all the linking and what not.

That and keeping a full time job where we are beginning 2 new product development tasks that should consume most of my time. I may be taking the lead on developing both the 3D CAD drawings as well as the software code for the controls of the system. That should keep me fairly busy since I would have to learn most of the coding from scratch.

Not to mention my recent engagement to my girlfriend. How she stayed with me this long is beyond me. My grandma always said “there’s no fly’s on that one.”

Are you trying to get more commentors on your blog? Sick of seeing all those other blogs with multiple comments on every post? You’re in luck. Cesar over a fleethecube.com has started a new site trying to promote the disabling of the nofollow tag.

The site is called yesfollow.org and explains how you can help the blogosphere and your own search engine ranking by disabling the nofollow tag associated with your comments. In both movabletype and wordpress blogs the default is to put a rel=”nofollow” tag on every comment. What this tells the search engine spiders is to not follow the links associated with the tag.

The blogosphere knows this and looks at comments on less established blogs as too much work for no reward. They would rather leave comments on blogs with a lot of traffic in the hopes that people would click-through. Now I’m not saying this is always the case, sure people leave comments to be helpful and to promote open discussion on a topic that may be dear to them. But a lot of comments are meant to attract people to click through to your blog.

In comes the dofollow plugin promoted by the yesfollow.org campaign. The idea is to make the standard in the blogosphere be dofollow and incentivise everyone to leave comments on others blogs, newbies and oldies alike. Bloggers will of course have to watch closely for spam but if you have control of your spam (and there are plugins that do this) you should want to use the dofollow plugin and help your fellow bloggers out.

So go join Cesar over at and download the plugin, activate it, and leave your feedback. It took me all of 5 minutes to do the whole thing, including leaving some length feedback at yesfollow.

Don’t forget to spread the word, it’ll help you SEO process.

Happy Commenting!

Forums are tough in every sense of the word. From getting people to join and keep visiting to getting people to moderate them, Forums are tough. But from that hard work of sticking with it can come great rewards.

I recently came upon, through a co-worker who knows this guy, a random blog published by someone who runs a Forum that I happen to belong to. This publisher recently was offered $25,000 for a golf forum that had, at last check, over 6,000 members and over 15,000 pages indexed in Google.

The Forum is Golf Rewind and if you visit the site you’ll notice the publisher hasn’t done much in the way of monetizing the site. Therefore I think $25,000 was a shot in the dark offer and with some monetization on the publishers part he could get a lot more than that offer. Which I think is why he didn’t sell the forum.

It would be interesting to know the traffic numbers as well as why he doesn’t monetize every single forum thread. I see only a few with small Google ads placed in obscure places that probably don’t have high click-through rates.

I will try and track this person down and find out more about the offer and the plan for Golf Rewind but this publisher has put in a lot of time and effort making a site that has high traffic, excellent repeat visitors and a good place to make money. Forums are tough to maintain and you gotta give him credit for keeping with it.

33 Domain Names
3 blogs
1 niche content site
average about $0.20 a day in some type of income

The $0.20 a day earnings are promising but nothing to write home about. The domain names, well I’m not parking any of them with income stream sites so making money on those is non-existent. I have, however, learned a lot about blogging and website development in general. Enough I feel that I have given myself a good base to really jump into the online empire building world.

I have been hemming and hawing over the question “Is it too late to get into the online game?” My conclusion. Heck no. The amount internet users grows daily and with previously poverty stricken countries finding wealth that number shouldn’t slow down any time soon.

Therefore, over the next 3 weeks I am going to try and develop a base site layout that I can apply blogs to and build sites. My plan is to develop a quality CSS based blog layout and use wordpress to publish my blogs. Then I am going to develop a php based niche content site layout (as well as using CSS) and publish a few more of those. My goal is to have 5 more, in addition to the 3 blogs I keep now, within a month.

My goal is to streamline everything. Use one statistics package, an easily maintained blog publisher, easy to add content layout for niche sites, and a good promotional plan. I will have to schedule writing times everyday to write on each blog and update content based sites.

It will take some time to setup but I feel I have learned enough about building websites and maintaining them that if I execute a good plan I will be able to easily keep this many sites while working 9-5, running, playing golf, tennis, and being social. We’ll see.

A quick hint for those of you wondering why a slice might have crept back into your drive.

Recently, with what little time I have been spending on golf, I have been working on my middle irons. Mostly my 5, 6, and 7 iron shots. These seem to be the most used by myself as I usually hit my drive leaving about 140 to 180 to the green. These are a little steeper back swings, again I’m using the one-plane swing, and the steeper the back swing with a longer club, the more difficult it is to bring back around to square.

When I went to hit my driver, which I haven’t been hitting, I have seen a slice come back into my shot. In order to remedy the slice I have determined that I need to flatten out my back swing concentrating on keeping the swing on one plane. If I bring the club back and then up over my head it tends to dip my left should (righty) and cause my swing to come outside-to-in. This brings about a slice.

What I need to remind myself when I draw the club back is to immediately angle the club on the same line as the club was on approach. This will give me the proper angle when I initiate my downswing and bring the club back to square hitting straighter shots. I tried this on the last few holes and was successful.

Too often I want to wind up and whack the ball as hard as I can causing errant shots from a poor swing plane. Think about flattening out your shot, keeping it on that single plane and you will help alleviate your slice and properly fix your golf shot. Hope this helps get you to scratch golfing.

In a recent post entitled Help Me! Should I change my Blog I discussed issues I was having with my blog. I have been debating with changing my blog and the direction that it’s going and splitting it up into a few different blogs. I don’t want to loose my page rank and all my incoming links and I worry about losing some the of the almost 30 subscribers that I’ve had over the past few months.

With that I discussed starting many blogs. It didn’t dawn on me until I wrote it down and then I realized that I was essentially saying I wanted to start a blog network from the ideas and directions that this blog has pulled me in. Of course there are a lot of blog networks and of course I have very little time to build a network of blogs that I can maintain.

It’ll be tough but there are a lot of people out there maintaining blog networks and making a decent amount of money from them. I don’t expect to become a Weblog’s Inc., or a B5media. They have been able to build good brand recognition and make continued growth. If I can make enough money to make it worth my while I will continue, who wouldn’t.

As I was going through my decision of whether or not to pursue this new idea I came to two points that I think anyone considering building a blog network as a solo blogger. (I could open the network up to more writers but that would be a good issue to have.)

1. Are there enough topics that you would want to write about to build a blog network on?
and
2. Can you build an efficient way to blog?

The first one I think is important. Find some topics you like and blog about them. Don’t worry about there be to many blogs in that category. If you continue to post you’ll gain a following, especially if there are some useful posts. The second one I think is a good point to look into. If you’re going to start a blog network as a solo blogger you can’t waste a lot of time thinking and debating about blog posts and layout. Pick a layout, and then just blog.

I will keep you all update as to how my blog network is going. I currently maintain 3 blogs but have been mediocre at best maintaining them. I plan on focusing my efforts on efficient ways to blog and will share my ideas with you here and possibly in another blog I plan on starting. Stick with me and I’ll hopefully stick with building a successful blog network.

I’ve been training on and off for the last three months trying to get back into running and was asked by a co-worker if I would run a leg of a triathlon. He and another did the swimming and the biking and I was to run 3.5 miles.

During the 3 weeks prior to the race I was working towards a project at work requiring about 80 hours a week of my time. Needless to say I wasn’t running. I actually only got to workout 3 times during that 3 weeks. I was a little worried about my fitness level and not sure if I was going to be able to meet my go of running at a 6:30 pace.

Well, Sunday rolled around and it was raining and early in the morning. I did a little warm up, some strides, maybe 15 minutes of running and a bit of stretching while our cyclist was out on the road. Both of them did pretty good so I was hoping to not disappoint.

I got the ankle strap (timing chip) and was on my way. The exhilaration of being in a competitive race was taking over and I was excited. I made it to the first mile and clocked a 6:05. A bit faster than the pace I wanted but I felt good. I decided to slow it down a little bit and see what I would feel like at 2 miles. Next mile was 6:57 and I began to feel a little tired but not horrible. I decided to speed it up a bit and made it to the 3rd mile in 6:18. I tried to keep the pace through the next half mile without crashing. I finished the last half mile in 3:09. That gave me an average pace of 6:24 per mile.

I was pleased. It wasn’t great but I reached my goal. I still have a lot to improve on but it got me excited about competing again.